Microsoft price cuts for Taiwan, US consumers, students, teachers

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Microsoft has announced quietly that the company has reached a deal with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission (TFTC). The TFTC zeroed in on Microsoft a little less than a year ago, investigating the company for unfair trade practices ranging from price gouging to unnecessary application bundling. The Press Release, which is clearly not written by someone with a strong command of English (which is odd, since it's on the MS US website), fails to mention the really interesting part of the deal: price cuts. WinInfo says that on average, Microsoft will be cutting prices in Taiwan by an average of 27%. Of course, the TFTC had alleged that Microsoft was selling its software at a comparatively higher value in Taiwan than in other countries, so this might only "even" the field, a bit. Curiously, this is all happening while Bill Gates is pimpin' Microsoft in China, and Dell is working to triple its growth rate in China and Japan. Follow the market, bloodhounds!

On the home front, Microsoft is slated to launch a new "Consumer and Academic Software Program" on the ides of March, which will cut prices on popular software for educational buyers, as well as the standard consumer. Details are not available as of yet, so it's difficult to determine how much deeper the prices will be cut. Academic versions of Microsoft software are already heavily discounted, and in the case of applications like Office XP, those versions are readily available to anyone.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher